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On 8 October 2018, the RDA BioSharing Registry: connecting data policies, standards & databases in life sciences Working Group was renamed to the FAIRSharing Registry: connecting data policies, standards & databases RDA Working Group. This change was approved by RDA Council following interaction with RDA Technical Advisory Board and the Working Group Co-chairs. The group name change reflects the broader constituency and potential user base of the working group recommendation, which goes beyond the biosciences community. A second, extended Request for Comments on the Working Group recommendation was open from 10 October – 10 December 2018 in order to ensure that the community at large, not just the Biosciences communities, had a chance to provide feedback and comments.

After the end of the Request for Comments period, the Working Group incorporated the comments and feedback received into the final version of the recommendation, published in January 2019. The previous version, together with the comments it received during the Requests for Comment period, can also be found on the Recommendations page, after the January 2019 version.

The FAIRsharing WG RDA Recommendation is now available:

We are very proud of our progress over the last two years and would like to thank everybody who has contributed to this successful output. One of only twelve outputs to be recommended by the RDA to date.

As the 18 month lifespan of this WG has passed (a limited WG lifespan is a condition of RDA WGs), this WG is now in 'maintenance mode'. This means that we are still active and able to fully participate in RDA Plenaries etc., and open for new adoptions and collaborations. Please contact us if you would like to become an adoptor or collaborator.

Please don't hesitate to contact us on contact@fairsharing.org if you would like to arrange to talk to us at an upcoming plenary or meeting or to invite one of our representatives to your session.

Related recommendations to guide users and the producers of standards and databases to select and describe these resources, or to recommend them in data policies. These are outlined in this WG's RDA recommendation.

This use cases-driven WG is a joint effort with Force11 and it is led and constituted by prospective adopters as well as technical implementers, many of whom are also leading and/or actively involved in other relevant RDA IGs and WGs, whose activities this WG complements and with which this WG will work closely. For more details, please refer to our Case Statement, found in the right-hand column.

Key outputs (May 2019):

1. The FAIRsharing RDA/Force11 joint WG recommendation is accepted by the RDA council. See the top of the page for more details.

2. The FAIRsharing GO-FAIR StRePo group is now active. This group, spread across the three pillars of GO-FAIR (GO CHANGE, GO BUILD and GO TRAIN) is set up to map the landscape of Standards, Repositories and data Policies and relate them to FAIR indicators, data management templates and more. Further information can be found on the FAIR StRePo site.

Key outputs (October 2018):

1. Introducing two new ontologies
All records in FAIRsharing are annotated with a number of ontologies, such as the NCBI taxon for species information (where appropriate) and SWO terms for licensing information. Now, we have split our user-generated domain tags into three fields, a subject/disciplines field, using our new Subject Resource Application Ontology (SRAO), a domains field, using our new Domains Resource Application Ontology (DRAO) and much smaller user-generated tags field. These two ontologies are open and have a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.

Key outputs (March 2018):

1. Content and curation - update
As of March 2018, we have 1168 standards, 1050 databases and 111 policies. Our aim is to ensure quality rather than quantity. A key part of this is working directly with the community, engaging the maintainers of each standard, database and policy to actively update the record for their resource on FAIRsharing. If you have not yet claimed the record for a resource that you help maintain, please head over to the FAIRsharing website and do so.

2. DOIs for Database, Standard and Policy records
Through a collaboration with the British Library and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, we now have DOIs for Database, Standard and Policy records in FAIRsharing. Each record can now be reached using its DOI, e.g.

We will be adding DOIs for our collection and recommendation records in the near future.

3. The FAIRsharing Embeddable Widget
We continue to update the widget and now have a version 1.0 available for implementation. We are working with a number of journal publishers to install the widget on their webpages to represent their data policies in an interactive, responsive table and graph. The widget can be used to represent a FAIRsharing collection or recommendation as either an interactive table or network graph. Many thanks to Scott and the GigaScience team for rolling out the widget on their pages. It can be viewed in-situ here.

4. Website development
Collection Comparison Tool - collections (groups of records related to a project, programme or organisation) and recommendations (groups of records endorsed by a journal publisher's or funder's data policy) can now be compared in a pairwise fashion. This tool allows users to assess the similarity between two collections/recommendations in terms of shared repositories and/or standards, overlapping species and disciplines and more.

Key outputs (June 2017):

After extensive community feedback the BioSharing registry is renamed to be the FAIRsharing registry, to reflect the growth in databases, standards and data policies beyond the life sciences. FAIRsharing will still cover the life sciences, and is a committed ELIXIR core resource, but now also contains information on non-life science resources, across the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences.

Key outputs (March 2017):

1. Growing Adoption - join us!
Our adopters are now listed in a table on our communities page, and here on the RDA WG page. Our adopters are not individuals, but organizations or projects that in turn serve individual researchers and other stakeholders. To be an adopter, a resource/group/organisation needs to use BioSharing in their work in some way (e.g. to inform their data policy or by creating and linking to a collection), and link back to FAIRsharing from their webpages. As you can see from the table, FAIRsharing has a growing diverse list of adopters, but we're always keen to add more, so please do spread the word and let us know if you think we have missed someone off our list.

2. RDA/Force11 FAIRsharing WG outputs
The joint RDA/Force11 FAIRsharing WG is coming to the end of its 18 month time frame, but will remain an activity in the RDA community as part of the RDA ELIXIR Bridging Force Interest Group. We are currently preparing our output package for consideration by the RDA (watch this space!) This is an important step as it will increase the visibility of FAIRsharing outside of the life/biomedical/environmental science domains and encourage cross-domain and discipline collaborations.

3. Content and curation - update
As of March 1st 2017, we have 674 standards and 841 databases and 94 data policies. Aiming for quality, accuracy and consistency, we have manually reviewed every single record in FAIRsharing, checking every field and relationship link. This means every record has been manually assessed within the last year. We are now in the process of contacting the maintainers and contacts for each record to ensure they are aware of this update and have added all they can to their record(s).

Every standard and database record is annotated with a tag indicating the readiness of that resource for implementation or use (status checked with the community). Currently we have 4 indicators, that can be found in the top left of each record card (Grid view) or in the column on the right (Table view): R - ready; Dev - in development; U - status uncertain; D - deprecated. These tags also assist the Educational side, below.

2. Educational resource

From the homepage user can access the:

- Educational section. A collection of over 40 frequently asked questions that cover the whats and whys of standards, how FAIRsharing can help users navigate standards, databases and data policies in the life sciences, and how to use and cite FAIRsharing: https://fairsharing.org/educational

FAIRsharing Standards Registry Survey: We have just closed our FAIRsharing Standards Registry survey, where we have assessed your needs for a registry of data/content standards in the life, environmental and biomedical sciences. We have had over 530 responses. We're now analysing the survey and will shortly publicize an executive summary of the results, along with the raw data.

Activities at RDA Plenary 6

Presentations

Thank-you for your feedback at the 6th Plenary meeting in Paris. It was great to catch up with everyone and to hear about the innovative and challenging work everyone is doing. If you didn’t manage to catch us at the meeting, our slides and our leaflet are available on Slideshare, as follows:

ISB2016 Conference - Geneva (CH) where we presented a poster on the FAIRsharing database registry (Tuesday 12th April) and ran a workshop on FAIRsharing, community curation and the BioDBcore guidelines (Wednesday 13th April)

UKON2016 Conference - Newcastle (UK) for a short talk on FAIRsharing on Thursday 14th April

FORCE2016 Conference - Portland (OR) at the Propelled by FORCE session on Tuesday April 19th at 10am

On behalf of one of my colleagues at NTNU (The Norwegian University of Science and Technology), I would like to ask for feedback on a draft for a Biomedical Data License which is coordinated by HUNT data center https://www.ntnu.edu/mh/huntcloud/. See below for the full request.

I am a new member of RDA, and I do apologize if these groups are not the most suitable. Any suggestions of other groups or communities (also outside RDA) that would be relevant to contact are highly appreciated.